WHAT GOOD IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

Fred Dretske

If consciousness is good for something, conscious things
must differ in some causally relevant way from unconscious things. If
they do not, then, as Davies and Humphrey (1993: 4-5) conclude, too bad
for consciousness: "psychological theory need not be concerned with
this topic."

Stones are not conscious, but we are.[3] And so are many animals. We are not
only conscious (full stop), we are conscious of
things--of objects (the bug in my soup), events (the commotion in the
hall), properties (the color of his tie), and facts (that he is
following me). Following Rosenthal (1990), I call all these
creature consciousness. In this sense the word is
applied to beings who can lose and regain consciousness and be
conscious of things and that things are so.

Creature consciousness is to be distinguished from what Rosenthal calls
state consciousness--the sense in which certain mental
states, processes, events and activities (in or of conscious beings)
are said to be either conscious. or unconscious. When we describe
desires, fears, and experiences as being conscious or unconscious we
attribute or deny consciousness, not to a being, but to some state,
condition or process in that being. States (processes, etc.), unlike
the creatures in whom they occur, are not conscious of anything or that
anything is so although we can be conscious of them and their
occurrence in a creature may make that creature conscious of
something.

That is the distinction. How does it help with our
question? I'll say how in a moment, but before I do, I need to make a
few things explicit about my use of relevant terms. Not everyone (I've
discovered) talks the way I do when they talk about consciousness. So
let me say how I talk. My language is, I think, entirely standard (I
use no technical terms), but just in case my readers talk funny, I want
them to know how ordinary folk talk about these matters.

For purposes of this discussion and in accordance with most
dictionaries I regard "conscious" and "aware" as synonyms. Being
conscious of a thing (or fact) is being aware of it. Alan White
(1964) describes interesting differences between the ordinary use of
"aware" and "conscious". He also describes the different liaisons
they have to noticing, attending, and realizing. Though my use of
these expressions as synonymous for present purposes blurs some of
these ordinary distinctions, I think nothing essential to this topic
is lost by ignoring the nuances.

This is important. I say that if you see (hear, etc.) it, you are
conscious of it. The "it" refers to
what you are aware of (the burning toast), not
that you are aware of it. There are two ways one
might, while being aware of burning toast, fail to be aware that one
is aware of it. First, one might know one is aware of something, but
not know what it is. "What is that I smell," is the remark of a person
who might well be aware of (i.e., smell) burning toast without being
aware that he is aware of burning toast. Second, even if one knows
what it is one is aware of--knows that it is burning toast--one might
not understand what it means to be aware of it, might not, therefore,
be aware that one is aware of it. A small child or an
animal--creatures who lack the concept of awareness--can be conscious
of (i.e., smell) burning toast without ever being aware that they are
aware of something. Even if they happen to know that
what they are aware of is burning toast, they do not
know--are not, therefore, aware--that they are aware
of it.

So, once again, when I say that if you see, hear, or smell something
you must be conscious of it , the "it" refers to
what you are aware of (burning toast, a french
horn), not whatitis you are aware of or that you are
aware of it . To be conscious of an F is not the
same as being conscious that it is an F and certainly not the same as
being conscious that one is conscious of an F. Animals (not to
mention human infants) are presumably aware of a great many things
(they see, smell, and feel the things around them). Nonetheless,
without the concept of awareness, and without concepts for most of
the things they are aware of, they are not aware of
what they are aware of nor that
they are aware of it. What they are conscious of is burning toast.
They are not aware that it is burning toast nor that they are aware
of it.

So much for terminological preliminaries. I have not yet said
anything that is controversial. Still, with only these meagre
resources, we are in a position to usefully divide our original
question into two more manageable parts. Questions about the good of
consciousness, about its purpose or function, can either be questions
about creature consciousness or about state consciousness. I will, for
the rest of this section, take them to be questions about creature
consciousness. I return to state consciousness in the next section.

If, then, we take our question about the purpose of consciousness as a
question about creature consciousness, about the
benefits that consciousness affords the animals who are conscious, the
answer would appear to be obvious. If animals could not see, hear,
smell and taste the objects in their environment--if they were not (in
these ways) conscious--how could they find food and mates, avoid
predators, build nests, spin webs, get around obstacles, and, in
general, do the thousand things that have to be done in order to
survive and reproduce?

This answer is so easy I expect to be told that I'm not really
answering the question everyone is asking. I will surely be told that
questions about the function of consciousness are not questions about
why we--conscious beings--are conscious. It is not a question about
the biological advantage of being able to see, hear, smell, and feel
(thus, being conscious of) the things around us. It is, rather, a
question about state consciousness, a question about
why there are conscious states, processes, and activities
in conscious creatures. Why, for instance, do
conscious beings have conscious experiences and thoughts?

2. The Second Distinction: Objects vs. Acts of Awareness.

If our question is a question about the benefits of state
consciousness, then, of course, we have preliminary work to do before
we start answering it. We have to get clear about what a conscious
state (process, activity) is. What, for instance, makes an experience,
a thought, a desire, conscious? We all have a pretty good grip on what
a conscious animal is. It is one that is--via some perceptual
modality--aware of things going on around (or in) it. There are, no
doubt, modes of awareness, ways of being conscious, which we do not
know about and will never ourselves experience. We do not, perhaps,
understand bat phenomenology or what it is like for dogfish to
electrically sense their prey. But we do understand the familiar
modalities--seeing, hearing, tasting and so on-- and these, surely,
qualify as ways of being conscious. So I understand,
at a rough and ready level, what someone is talking about when they
talk about a creature's being conscious in one of these ways. But what
does it mean to speak, not of an animal being conscious in one of these
ways, but of some state, process, or activity in the
animal as being conscious? States, remember, aren't conscious
of anything. They are just conscious (or unconscious)
full stop. So what kind of property is this? And
what makes a state conscious? Until we understand this, we won't be in
a position to even speculate about what the function of a conscious
state is.

There are, as far as I can see, only two options for making sense out
of state consciousness. Either a state is made conscious by its being
an object or by its being an act of
creature consciousness. A state of creature S is an
object of creature consciousness by S being conscious
of it. A state of creature S is an act of creature
consciousness, on the other hand, not by S being aware
of it, but by S being made aware (so to speak)
with it--by its occurrence in S making (i.e.,
constituting) S's awareness and, therefore, if there is an object that
stands in the appropriate relation to this awareness, S's awareness of
some object. When state-consciousness is identified with a creature's
acts of awareness, the creature need not be aware of
these states for them to be conscious. What makes them conscious is
not S's awareness of them, but their role in making S
conscious--typically (in the case of sense perception), of some
(external) object.

Consider the second possibility first. On this option, a conscious
state (e.g., an experience) is one that makes an animal conscious.
When a gazelle sees a lion, its visual experience of the lion qualifies
as a conscious experience, a conscious state, because it makes the
gazelle visually conscious of the lion. Without this experience, the
gazelle would not be visually aware of anything--much less a lion.

There are, to be sure, states of (processes and activities in) the
gazelle which are not themselves conscious but which are necessary to
make the animal (visually) aware of the lion. Without eyes and the
assorted events occurring therein, the animal would not see
anything--would not, therefore, be visually conscious of lions or any
other external object. This is true enough, but it is irrelevant to
the act conception of state-consciousness. According to the act
conception of state-consciousness, a conscious visual state is one
without which the creature would not be visually conscious of
anything--not just external objects. The eyes may be
necessary for the gazelle to be conscious of (i.e., to see) the lion,
but they are not necessary for the animal to be conscious, to have the
sort of visual experiences that, when things are working right, are
normally caused by lions and are, therefore, experiences of lions. A
conscious visual state is one that is essential not just to a
creature's visual awareness of this or that kind of thing (e.g.,
external objects), but to its visual awareness of anything--including
the sorts of "things" (properties) one is aware of in hallucinations
and dreams. That is why, on an act account of state consciousness,
the processes in early vision, those occurring in the retina and optic
nerve, are not conscious. They may be necessary to a creature's visual
awareness of external objects, but they are not essential to visual
awareness. Even without them, the creature can still dream about or
hallucinate the things it can no longer see. The same
acts of awareness can still occur. They just don't
have the same (according to some, they don't have any)
objects

If we agree about this--agree, that is, that conscious states are
states that constitute creature consciousness (typically, of things),
then the function, the good, of state consciousness is evident. It is
to make creatures conscious, and if (see above) there is no problem
about why animals are conscious, then, on the act
conception of what a conscious state is, there is no problem about why
states are conscious. Their function is to make creatures conscious.
Without state consciousness, there is no creature consciousness. If
there is a biological advantage in gazelles being aware of prowling
lions, then there is a purpose in gazelles having conscious
experiences. The experiences are necessary to make the gazelle
conscious of the lions.

I do not expect many people to be impressed with this result. I
expect to be told that the states, activities, and processes occurring
in an animal are conscious not (as I have suggested) if the animal is
conscious with them, but, rather, if the animal (in
whom they occur) is conscious of them. A conscious
state is conscious in virtue of being an object, not an act, of
creature awareness. A state becomes conscious, according to this
orthodox line of thinking, when it becomes the object of some
higher-order thought or experience. Conscious states are not states
that make the creatures in whom they occur conscious; it is the other
way around: creatures make the states that occur in them conscious by
becoming conscious of them.

Since the only way states can become an object of consciousness is if
there are higher order acts which have them as their objects, this
account of state consciousness has come to be called a HO (for Higher
Order ) theory of consciousness. It has several distinct forms, but
all versions agree that an animal's experience (of lions, say) remains
unconscious (or, perhaps, non-conscious) until the animal becomes aware
of it. A higher order awareness of one's lion-experience can take the
form of a thought (a HOT theory)--in which case one is aware
that (i.e., one thinks that) one is experiencing a
lion--or the form of an experience (a HOE theory)--in which case one is
aware of the lion-experience in something like the way one is aware of
the lion: one experiences one's lion-experience (thus becoming aware of
one's lion-experience) in the way one is aware of (experiences) the
lion.

I have elsewhere (Dretske 1993, 1995) criticized HO theories of
consciousness, and I will not repeat myself here. I am more concerned
with what HO theories have to say--if, indeed, they have anything to
say--about the good of consciousness. If conscious states are states
we are, in some way, conscious of, why have conscious states? What do
conscious states do that unconscious states don't do? According to HO
theory, we (i.e., creatures) could be conscious of (i.e., see, hear,
and smell) most of the objects and events we are now conscious of (and
this includes whatever bodily conditions we are
proprioceptively aware of) without ever occupying a conscious state.
To be in a conscious state is to be conscious of the state, and since
the gazelle, for example, can be conscious of a lion without being
conscious of the internal states that make it conscious of the lion, it
can be conscious of the lion--i.e., see, smell, feel and hear the
lion--while occupying no conscious states at all. This being so, what
is the purpose, the biological point, of conscious states? It is
awareness of the lion that is useful, not awareness of one's lion
experiences. It is the lions, not the lion-experiences, that are
dangerous.

On an object conception of state-consciousness, it is difficult to
imagine how conscious states could have a function. To suppose that
conscious states have a function would be like supposing that conscious
ball bearings--i.e., ball bearings we are conscious of--have a
function. If a conscious ball bearing is a ball bearing we are
conscious of, then conscious ball bearings have exactly the same causal
powers as do the unconscious ones. The causal powers of a ball bearing
(as opposed to the causal powers of theobserver of the ball bearing) are in no way altered by
being observed or thought about. The same is true of mental states
like thoughts and experiences. If what makes an experience or a
thought conscious is the fact that S (the person in whom it occurs) is,
somehow, aware of it, then it is clear that the causal powers of the
thought or experience (as opposed to the causal powers of the thinker
or experiencer) are unaffected by its being conscious. Mental states
and processes would be no less effective in doing their job--whatever,
exactly, we take that job to be--if they were all unconscious.
According to HO theories of consciousness, then, asking about the
function of conscious states in mental affairs would be like asking
about the function of conscious ball bearings in mechanical affairs.

I concede the point. But I concede it about ball bearings too. I
cannot imagine conscious ball bearings having a function--simply
because conscious ball bearings don't do anything non-conscious ball
bearings don't do--but I can imagine their being some purpose served by
our being aware of ball bearings. If we are aware of
them, we can, for instance, point at them, refer to them, talk about
them. Perhaps, then, we can replace defective ones, something we
wouldn't do if we were not aware of them, and this sounds like a useful
thing to do. But this is something we can do by being
aware of them, not something they can do by our being
aware of them. If a conscious experience was an experience we were
aware of, then there would be no difference between conscious and
unconscious experiences--anymore than there would be a difference
between conscious and unconscious ball bearings. There would simply be
a difference in the creatures in whom such experiences occurred, a
difference in what they were aware of.

3. The Third Distinction: Object vs. Fact Awareness.

Once again, I expect to hear that this is all too quick.
Even if one should grant that conscious states are to be identified
with acts, not objects, of creature awareness, the question is not what
the evolutionary advantage of perceptual belief is, but what the
advantage of perceptual (i.e., phenomenal) experience is. What is the
point of having conscious experiences of lions (lion-qualia) as well as
conscious beliefs about lions? Why are we aware of objects (lions) as
well as various facts about them (that they are lions, that they are
headed this way)? After all, in the business of avoiding predators and
finding mates, what is important is not experiencing (e.g., seeing,
hearing) objects, but knowing certain facts about these objects. What
is important is not seeing a hungry lion but knowing (seeing)
that it is a lion, hungry, or whatever (with all that
this entails about the appropriate response on the part of lion-edible
objects). Being aware of (i.e., seeing) hungry lions and being aware
of them, simply, as tawny objects or
as large shaggy cats (something a two-year old child
might do) isn't much use to someone on the lion's dinner menu. It
isn't the objects you are aware of, the objects you see--and,
therefore, the qualia you experience--that is important in the struggle
for survival, it is the facts you are aware of, what you
know about what you see. Being aware of (seeing)
poisonous mushrooms (these objects) is no help to an animal who is not
aware of the fact that they are poisonous. It is the representation
of the fact that another animal is a receptive mate,
not simply the perception of a receptive mate, that is important in the
game of reproduction. As we all know from long experience, it is no
trick at all to see sexually willing (or, as the case may be,
unwilling) members of the opposite sex. The trick is to see which is
which--to know that the willing are willing and the others are not.
That is the skill--and it is a cognitive skill, a skill involving
knowledge of facts--that gives one a competitive edge in sexual
affairs. Good eyesight, a discriminating ear, and a sensitive nose
(and the qualia associated with these sense modalities) are of no help
in the struggle for survival if such experiences always (or often)
yield false beliefs about the objects perceived. It is the
conclusions, the beliefs, the knowledge, that is important, not the
qualia-laden experiences that normally give rise to such knowledge. So
why do we have phenomenal experience of objects as well as beliefs
about them? Or, to put the same question differently: Why are we
conscious of the objects we have knowledge about?

These are respectable questions. They deserve answers--scientific, not
philosophical, answers. But the answers--at least in a preliminary
way--would appear to be available. There are a great many important
facts that we cannot be made aware of unless we are, via phenomenal
experience, made aware of objects these facts are facts about. There
are also striking behavioral deficits--e.g., an inability to initiate
intentional action with respect to those parts of the world one does
not experience (Marcel 1988a). Humphrey (1970, 1972, 1974), worked for
many years with a single monkey, Helen, whose capacity for normal
vision was destroyed by surgical removal of her entire visual cortex.
Although Helen originally gave up even looking at things, she regained
certain visual capacities.

She improved so greatly over the next few years that eventually she
could move deftly through a room full of obstacles and pick up tiny
currants from the floor. She could even reach out and catch a passing
fly. Her 3-D spatial vision and her ability to discriminate between
objects that differed in size or brightness became almost perfect.
(Humphrey 1992: 88).

Nonetheless, after six years she remained unable to identify even those
things most familiar to her (e.g., a carrot). She did not recover the
ability to recognize shapes or colors. As Humphrey described Helen in
1977 (Humphrey 1992: 89),

She never regained what we--you and I--would call the sensations of
sight. I am not suggesting that Helen did not eventually discover that
she could after all use her eyes to obtain information about the
environment. She was a clever monkey and I have little doubt that , as
her training progressed, it began to dawn on her that she was indeed
picking up 'visual' information from somewhere--and that her eyes had
something to do with it. But I do want to suggest that, even if she
did come to realize that she could use her eyes to obtain visual
information, she no longer knew how that information came to her: if
there was a currant before her eyes she would find that she knew its
position but, lacking visual sensation, she no longer
saw it as being there. . . . The information she
obtained through her eyes was 'pure perceptual knowledge' for which she
was aware of no substantiating evidence in the form of visual sensation
. . .

If we follow Humphrey and suppose that Helen, though still able to see
where objects were (conceptually represent them as there), was unable
to see them there, had no (visual) experience of them, we have a
suggestion (at least) of what the function of phenomenal experience is:
we experience (i.e., see, hear, and smell) them to help in our
identification and recognition of them. Remove visual sensations of X
and S might still be able to tell where X is, but S
will not be able to tell what X is. Helen couldn't.
That is--or may be--a reasonable empirical conjecture for the purpose
of experience--for why animals (including humans) are, via perceptual
experience, made aware of objects. It seems to be the only way--or at
least a way--of being made aware of pertinent facts
about them.

Despite the attention generated by dissociation phenomena, it remains
clear that people afflicted with these syndromes are always "deeply
disabled" (Weiskrantz 1991: 8). Unlike Helen, human patients never
recover their vision to anything like the same degree that the monkey
did. Though they do much better than they "should" be able to do, they
are still not very good Humphrey (1992: 89). Blindsight subjects
cannot avoid bumping into lamp-posts, even if they can guess their
presence or absence in a forced-choice situation. Furthermore,

All these subjects lack the ability to think about or to image the
objects that they can respond to in another mode, or to inter-relate
them in space and in time; and this deficiency can be crippling
(Weiskrantz, 1991: 8).

This being so, there seems to be no real empirical problem about the
function (or at least a function) of phenomenal experience. The
function of experience, the reason animals are conscious of objects and
their properties, is to enable them to do all those things that those
who do not have it cannot do. This is a great deal indeed. If we
assume (as it seems clear from these studies we have a right to assume)
that there are many things people with experience can do that people
without experience cannot do, then that is a perfectly
good answer to questions about what the function of experience is.
That is why we, and a great many other animals, are conscious of things
and, thus, why, on an act conception of state consciousness, we have
conscious experiences. Maybe something else besides experience would
enable us to do the same things, but this would not show that
experience didn't have a function. All it would show is that there was
more than one way to skin a cat--more than one way to get the job
done. It would not show that the mechanism that did the job wasn't
good for something.

FOOTNOTES

1. There is a sense in which it enables me to
do things I would not otherwise be able to do--e.g., bequeath my books
to my nephews and nieces--but this, clearly, is a constitutive, not a
causal, sense of "enable." Spelling out this difference in a precise
way is difficult. I will not try to do it. I'm not sure I can. I
hope the intuitive distinction will be enough for my purposes.

3. I here ignore dispositional senses of the
relevant terms--the sense in which we say of someone or something that
it is a conscious being even if, at the time we describe it this way,
it is not (in any occurrent sense) conscious. So, for example, in the
dispositional sense, I am a conscious being even during dreamless
sleep.

4. I here ignore disputes about whether, in
some strict sense, we are really aware of objects or only (in smell)
odors emanating from them or (in hearing) voices or noises they make.
I shall always take the perceptual object--what it is we see, hear, or
smell (if there is such an object)--to be some external physical object
or condition. I will not be concerned with just what
object or condition this is.

5. In saying this I assume two things, both of
which strike me as reasonably obvious: (1) to be aware that you are
aware of a french horn requires some understanding of what awareness
is (not to mention an understanding of what a french horn is); and (2)
mice (even if we give them some understanding of french horns) do not
understand what awareness is (they do not have this
concept).

6. This is not to say that consciousness is
always advantageous. As Georges Rey reminds me, some
tasks--playing the piano, pronouncing language, and playing sports--are
best performed when the agent is largely unaware of the performatory
details. Nonetheless, even when one is unconscious of the means,
consciousness of the end (e.g., the basket into which one is trying to
put the ball, the net into which one is trying to hit the puck, the
teammate to whom one is trying to throw the ball) is essential. You
don't have to be aware of just how you manage to backhand the shot to
do it skillfully, but, if you are going to be successful in backhanding
the puck into the net, you have to be aware of where the net is.

7. I assume here that, according to HOT
theories, the higher order thought one has about a lion experience that
makes that experience conscious is that it is a lion experience (an
experience of a lion). This needn't be so (Rosenthal
1991denies that it is so), but if it isn't so, it is even harder to see
what the good of conscious experiences might be. What good would be a
thought about a lion experience that it was . . . what? . . . a
(generic) experience?

8. I'm skipping over a difficulty that I should
at least acknowledge here. There are a variety of mental states--urges,
desires, intentions, purposes, etc.--which we speak of as conscious
(and unconscious) whose consciousness cannot be analyzed in terms of
their being acts (instead of objects
) of awareness since, unlike the sensory states associated with
perceptual awareness (seeing, hearing, and smelling), they are not, or
do not seem to be, states of awareness. If these
states are conscious, they seem to be made so by being objects, not
acts of consciousness (see, e.g., Van Gulick 1985). I don't here have
the space to discuss this alleged difference with the care it
deserves. I nonetheless acknowledge its relevance to my present thesis
by restricting my claims about state-consciousness to
experiences--more particularly, perceptual
experiences. Whatever it is that makes a desire for an apple, or an
intention to eat one, conscious, experiences of apples are made
conscious not by the creature in whom they occur being conscious of
them, but by making the creature in whom they occur conscious (of
apples).

9. For more on blindsight see Weiskrantz 1986
and Milner & Rugg 1992. I here assume that a subject's (professed)
absence of visual experience is tantamount to a claim that they cannot
see objects, that they have no visual experience. The question that
blindsight raises is why one has to see objects (or anything else, for
that matter) in order to see facts pertaining to those objects--what
(who, where, etc.) they are. If blindsighters can see where an object
is, the fact that it is there (where they point),
without seeing it (the object at which they point), what purpose is
served by seeing it?

10. There are a good many reflexive "sensings"
(Walker 1983: 240) that involve no awareness of the stimulus that is
controlling behavior--e.g., accommodation of the lens of the eye to
objects at different distances, reactions of the digestive system to
internal forms of stimulation, direction of gaze toward peripherally
seen objects. Milner (1992:143) suggests that these "perceptions" are
probably accomplished by the same midbrain visuomotor systems as
mediate prey catching in frogs and orienting reactions in rats and
monkeys. What is puzzling about blindsight is not that we get
information we are not aware of (these reflexive sensings are all
instances of that), but that in the case of blindsight one appears able
to use this information in the control and guidance of deliberate,
intentional, action (when put in certain forced choice situations)--the
sort of action which normally requires awareness.